Anuparna Roy, an Indian filmmaker who won the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons best director prize for her debut feature “Songs of Forgotten Trees,” is returning to the festival with her second film, “Lovers in the Blue Night.” The new work will premiere in the Horizons competition section, with international sales managed by Parallax.
Roy has described the production of her latest film as significantly more professional than her debut, which was made under difficult funding conditions and centered on two women confined largely to a single house. “Lovers in the Blue Night” expands the scope to follow four migrants as they move through Mumbai. The director reflected that while she dreamed of her work reaching the main competition, she is not disappointed by its Horizons placement and considers herself still in the early stages of her career alongside filmmakers she admires.
The film’s central narrative draws from a childhood memory of a bonded laborer named Ameena and something she once said about her marriage. As Roy developed this character for the script, her approach evolved from an initial instinct toward straightforward liberation. Instead, she recognized that conventional escape routes could themselves represent entrapment. The story centers on Karim, a closeted gay man married to Ameena, and his lover Sukka, a man attempting to break free of caste restrictions. Roy emphasized treating both characters with neutral, empathetic language rather than reducing their experiences to poverty or ideology.
Roy deliberately crafted scenes that place her characters’ circumstances alongside their ordinary emotional needs for intimacy, jealousy, and tenderness. One particular image—Karim, who kills rats in wealthy Mumbai housing societies, coming home to kiss another man—Roy characterized as revolutionary and deeply political. The filmmaker framed love itself as a form of resistance for characters punished for their desires, describing an “illusion of love” where affection, longing, isolation, need, and fantasy blur together.
Both this film and Roy’s debut draw thematic connections to floods she experienced growing up in a coastal region near the Bangladesh border. Her upcoming projects include “In the Shadow in the Light,” a romantic feature exploring a dysfunctional marriage, and an untitled work centered on a woman’s sexual experience.
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